This is a still from a film series called "Film Montagen", by the German artist Peter Roehr, born in 1944 and dead already 24 years later. (Click on the image to view a clip from one piece). There's a tiny Roehr survey up now in a small New York gallery called Osmos Address, run by the itinerant editor and curator Cay Sophie Rabinowitz. One wag described Roehr to me as a cross between Warhol (for his Pop and advertising imagery) and Sol LeWitt (for his rigor and grids and repeated modules). In Roehr's "Film Montagen", built from tiny loops of found commercial footage, there's also a big dose of the narrative experiments of Christian Marclay and Douglas Gordon – except of course that they were working with found film decades after Roehr already had.
And I love this factoid culled from the press release: "In 1968, in the midst of Vietnam and as part of a generation of determined, hedonistic, and controversial intellectuals Peter Roehr – only 24 years old and already in the last year of his life – decided to abandon institutional art, go underground, and open a head shop called Pudding Explosion."
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